Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli Page A

bring lawn chairs, coolers, and little grills to cook out on. You can also buy tamales from the tamale guy working out of the back of a van or peanuts from the peanut man, who moves around the crowd in the manner of a ballpark vendor, except instead of a neck-slung hot dog or beverage container he carries a brown duffel bag stuffed with hand-baggied portions of peanuts, the bag itself—the duffel, not the individual baggies, which would’ve likely been prohibitively labor intensive for his pricing structure—helpfully marked PEANUT MAN.
    Barrow, a retired autoworker, never sits in with the band. “Well, I sing once in a while,” he says, “but there ain’t nothing to it.” You see him working the crowd between sets, exhorting people to “chuck it in the bucket,” “it” meaning cash money, “the bucket” meaning the bucket he hauls around to collect the optional cover charge. “I need money to cut this lawn, people!” Barrow also shouts, when he’s not telling people to chuck it in the bucket. What he doesn’t say, not until the very end of a long conversation, and then only as a casual aside, is that he happens to be related to one of the neighborhood’s most famous sons. His first cousin was Joe Louis Barrow, who grew up in Black Bottom, worked after school at Eastern Market, and learned to box at a recreation center near the Brewster-Douglass projects.
    The corner of Frederick and St. Aubin could be an historical reenactment of the very rural Southern past left behind by the ancestors of so many African American Detroiters, and however temptingly easy and perhaps even inevitable the romanticization of such a scene might be, it’s nonetheless not unreasonable to worry about how the best and the brightest diligently taking their pencils to the map of Detroit with the intention of “rightsizing” the place might fail to budget for this sort of thing, unthinkingly squeezing out the cherished alchemic components necessary to make a truly great city: the messiness, the clamor, the unplanned jostlings and anarchic eccentricity. Raising any sort of gentrification fears at this earliest stage of Detroit’s would-be comeback feels like an academic luxury. And yet, when phrases like “the most potentially ambitious urban planning initiative in modern history” are being bandied about (to describe Bing administration’s rightsizing efforts), it’s hard not to grimace at the thought of the plasticized, deadening nature of planned communities.
    Many would consider nearby Lafayette Park, the Mies van der Rohe development that partly replaced the razed Black Bottom neighborhood, one of the more successful residential areas in Detroit: middle class, diverse, safe. Even the chilly architecture, by this date, has aged into an appealing Alphaville sort of retro chic. And yet, I’d venture to guess you could spend as much time in Lafayette Park as you fancied and you would never see a house band jamming on a stage made of pallets while a singer in his seventies named Kenny Miller, dressed casually in a tan windbreaker, gray denim pants, and white Fila sneakers, his only nod to show business being his gold-rimmed brown-tinted glasses, performed “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss.” Nor would you be able to wander among a standing-room crowd and spot a guy dressed in the official-looking vest of a casino employer dealing out a poker game. You wouldn’t have seen thirty people move into the center of the field to join an elaborate step dance to a song called “Wobble” and you wouldn’t have noticed the number of men arriving on motorcycle and seemingly affiliated with one of the city’s many black biker clubs, their leather jackets, per custom, signifying which club precisely, e.g., the Black Dragons, the Outcasts, the Black Gentlemen, the Sons of Zodiac, and (a personal favorite) the Elegant Disciples. You wouldn’t have the opportunity to shake the hands of one of the Outcasts or to be the recipient of the